The chief, a six-footer, wearing beautifully decorated gauntlets and a pair of white buckskin chaps, went so far as to say it was a little warm for the time of year.In the freshness of evening, when frazzled nerves had regained their steadiness, he returned to smoke and yarn with us and tell us of the peculiarities of the cattle business in the Cuyamas.At present he and his men were riding the great mountains, driving the cattle to the lowlands in anticipation of a rodeo the following week.A rodeo under that sun!
We slept in the ranch vehicles, so the air could get under us.While the stars still shone, we crawled out, tired and unrefreshed.The Tenderfoot and Iwent down the valley after the horses.While we looked, the dull pallid gray of dawn filtered into the darkness, and so we saw our animals, out of proportion, monstrous in the half light of that earliest morning.
Before the range riders were even astir we had taken up our journey, filching thus a few hours from the inimical sun.
Until ten o'clock we traveled in the valley of the Cuyamas.The river was merely a broad sand and stone bed, although undoubtedly there was water below the surface.California rivers are said to flow bottom up.To the northward were mountains typical of the arid countries,--boldly defined, clear in the edges of their folds, with sharp shadows and hard, uncompromising surfaces.They looked brittle and hollow, as though made of papier mache and set down in the landscape.A long four hours' noon we spent beneath a live-oak near a tiny spring.I tried to hunt, but had to give it up.After that I lay on my back and shot doves as they came to drink at the spring.
It was better than walking about, and quite as effective as regards supper.A band of cattle filed stolidly in, drank, and filed as stolidly away.Some half-wild horses came to the edge of the hill, stamped, snorted, essayed a tentative advance.Them we drove away, lest they decoy our own animals.The flies would not let us sleep.Dozens of valley and mountain quail called with maddening cheerfulness and energy.
By a mighty exercise of will we got under way again.
In an hour we rode out into what seemed to be a grassy foot-hill country, supplied with a most refreshing breeze.
The little round hills of a few hundred feet rolled gently away to the artificial horizon made by their closing in.The trail meandered white and distinct through the clear fur-like brown of their grasses.
Cattle grazed.Here and there grew live-oaks, planted singly as in a park.Beyond we could imagine the great plain, grading insensibly into these little hills.
And then all at once we surmounted a slight elevation, and found that we had been traveling on a plateau, and that these apparent little hills were in reality the peaks of high mountains.
We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet-creased range that dipped down and down to miniature canons far below.Not a single little boulder broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses.
Out from beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and inert with heat.
Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of brush, showed indeterminate for a little distance.But only for a little distance.Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness of atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the distance in mystery and in dread.It was a land apart; a land to be looked on curiously from the vantage-ground of safety,--as we were looking on it from the shoulder of the mountain,--and then to be turned away from, to be left waiting behind its brown veil for what might come.To abandon the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the known, deliberately to seek the presence that lay in wait,--all at once it seemed the height of grotesque perversity.We wanted to turn on our heels.
We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes and clear water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our trails and the sweet upper air.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses, gazing down.Some unknown disturbance lazily rifted the brown veil by ever so little.We saw, lying inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a great round lake.We knew the water to be bitter, poisonous.The veil drew together again.Wes shook himself and sighed, "There she is,--damn her!" said he.
